Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

In a world of self-driving cars and big data, smart algorithms and Siri, we know that artificial intelligence is getting smarter every day. Though all these nifty devices and programs might make our lives easier, they're also well on their way to making "good" jobs obsolete. A computer winning Jeopardy might seem like a trivial, if impressive, feat, but the same technology is making paralegals redundant as it undertakes electronic discovery, and is soon to do the same for radiologists.

The top 1 percent of Americans control 40 percent of the nation's wealth. And, as Joseph E. Stiglitz explains, while those at the top enjoy the best health care, education, and benefits of wealth, they fail to realize that "their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live." Stiglitz draws on his deep understanding of economics to show that growing inequality is not inevitable. He examines our current state, then teases out its implications for democracy, for monetary and budgetary policy, and for globalization. He closes with a plan for a more just and prosperous future.

Debt - Updated and Expanded: The First 5,000 Years

Here, anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom: He shows that before there was money, there was debt. For more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods - that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors.

James C. Samans says:"Transformative to the point of being revolutionary"

Civilization: The West and the Rest

The rise to global predominance of Western civilization is the single most important historical phenomenon of the past five hundred years. All over the world, an astonishing proportion of people now work for Western-style companies, study at Western-style universities, vote for Western-style governments, take Western medicines, wear Western clothes, and even work Western hours. Yet six hundred years ago the petty kingdoms of Western Europe seemed unlikely to achieve much more than perpetual internecine warfare. It was Ming China or Ottoman Turkey that had the look of world civilizations.

Your Deceptive Mind: A Scientific Guide to Critical Thinking Skills

No skill is more important in today's world than being able to think about, understand, and act on information in an effective and responsible way. What's more, at no point in human history have we had access to so much information, with such relative ease, as we do in the 21st century. But because misinformation out there has increased as well, critical thinking is more important than ever. These 24 rewarding lectures equip you with the knowledge and techniques you need to become a savvier, sharper critical thinker in your professional and personal life.

No Excuses: Existentialism and the Meaning of Life

What is life? What is my place in it? What choices do these questions obligate me to make? More than a half-century after it burst upon the intellectual scene - with roots that extend to the mid-19th century - Existentialism's quest to answer these most fundamental questions of individual responsibility, morality, and personal freedom, life has continued to exert a profound attraction.

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State

In May 2013, Glenn Greenwald set out for Hong Kong to meet an anonymous source who claimed to have astonishing evidence of pervasive government spying and insisted on communicating only through heavily encrypted channels. That source turned out to be the 29-year-old NSA contractor Edward Snowden, and his revelations about the agency’s widespread, systemic overreach proved to be some of the most explosive and consequential news in recent history, triggering a fierce debate over national security....

Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces

Rise of the Warrior Cop traces the arc of US law enforcement from the constables and private justice of colonial times to present-day SWAT teams and riot cops. Today relentless "war on drugs" and "war on terror" pronouncements from politicians, along with battle-clad police forces with tanks and machine guns, have dangerously blurred the distinction between cop and soldier. Balko's fascinating, frightening narrative shows how martial rhetoric and reactionary policies have put modern law enforcement on a collision course with the values of a free society.

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives

Few companies in history have ever been as successful and as admired as Google, the company that has transformed the Internet and become an indispensable part of our lives. How has Google done it? Veteran technology reporter Steven Levy was granted unprecedented access to the company, and in this revelatory book he takes listeners inside Google headquarters - the Googleplex - to explain how Google works.

Einstein's Relativity and the Quantum Revolution: Modern Physics for Non-Scientists, 2nd Edition

"It doesn't take an Einstein to understand modern physics," says Professor Wolfson at the outset of these 24 lectures on what may be the most important subjects in the universe: relativity and quantum physics. Both have reputations for complexity. But the basic ideas behind them are, in fact, simple and comprehensible by anyone. These dynamic and illuminating lectures begin with a brief overview of theories of physical reality starting with Aristotle and culminating in Newtonian or "classical" physics.

It's the 21st century, and although we tried to rear unisex children - boys who play with dolls and girls who like trucks - we failed. Even though the glass ceiling is cracked, most women stay comfortably beneath it. And everywhere we hear about vitally important "hardwired" differences between male and female brains. The neuroscience that we read about in magazines, newspaper articles, books, and even scientific journals increasingly tells a tale of two brains, and the result is a validation of the status quo.

Food: A Cultural Culinary History

Eating is an indispensable human activity. As a result, whether we realize it or not, the drive to obtain food has been a major catalyst across all of history, from prehistoric times to the present. Epicure Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin said it best: "Gastronomy governs the whole life of man."

You Are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself

You Are Now Less Dumb is grounded in the idea that we all believe ourselves to be objective observers of reality - except we’re not. But that's okay, because our delusions keep us sane. Expanding on this premise, McRaney provides eye-opening analyses of 15 more ways we fool ourselves every day. This smart and highly entertaining audiobook will be wowing listeners for years to come.

The Mind Club: Who Thinks, What Feels, and Why It Matters

Nothing seems more real than the minds of other people. When you consider what your boss is thinking or whether your spouse is happy, you are admitting them into the "mind club". It's easy to assume other humans can think and feel, but what about a cow, a computer, a corporation? What kinds of minds do they have? Daniel M. Wegner and Kurt Gray are award-winning psychologists who have discovered that minds - while incredibly important - are a matter of perception.

1066: The Year That Changed Everything

With this exciting and historically rich six-lecture course, experience for yourself the drama of this dynamic year in medieval history, centered on the landmark Norman Conquest. Taking you from the shores of Scandinavia and France to the battlefields of the English countryside, these lectures will plunge you into a world of fierce Viking warriors, powerful noble families, politically charged marriages, tense succession crises, epic military invasions, and much more.

Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East

Based on four years of intensive primary document research, Lawrence in Arabiadefinitively overturns received wisdom on how the modern Middle East was formed. Sweeping in its action, keen in its portraiture, acid in its condemnation of the destruction wrought by European colonial plots, this is a book that brilliantly captures the way in which the folly of the past creates the anguish of the present.

The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome

This is the first volume in a bold new series that tells the stories of all peoples, connecting historical events from Europe to the Middle East to the far coast of China, while still giving weight to the characteristics of each country. Susan Wise Bauer provides both sweeping scope and vivid attention to the individual lives that give flesh to abstract assertions about human history. This narrative history employs the methods of "history from beneath" - literature, epic traditions, private letters, and accounts - to connect kings and leaders with the lives of those they ruled.

What Doctors Feel: How Emotions Affect the Practice of Medicine

In What Doctors Feel, Dr. Danielle Ofri has taken on the task of dissecting the hidden emotional responses of doctors, and how these directly influence patients. How do the stresses of medical life - from paperwork to grueling hours to lawsuits to facing death - affect the medical care that doctors can offer their patients? Digging deep into the lives of doctors, Ofri examines the daunting range of emotions - shame, anger, empathy, frustration, hope, pride, occasionally despair, and sometimes even love - that permeate the contemporary doctor-patient connection.

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

All our lives are constrained by limited space and time, limits that give rise to a particular set of problems. What should we do, or leave undone, in a day or a lifetime? How much messiness should we accept? What balance of new activities and familiar favorites is the most fulfilling? These may seem like uniquely human quandaries, but they are not: computers, too, face the same constraints, so computer scientists have been grappling with their version of such problems for decades.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the origins of our divisions and points the way forward to mutual understanding. His starting point is moral intuition - the nearly instantaneous perceptions we all have about other people and the things they do. These intuitions feel like self-evident truths, making us righteously certain that those who see things differently are wrong. Haidt shows us how these intuitions differ across cultures, including the cultures of the political left and right.

Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires

Genovese, Gambino, Bonnano, Colombo, and Lucchese. For decades these Five Families ruled New York and built the American Mafia (or Cosa Nostra) into an underworld empire. Today, the Mafia is an endangered species, battered and beleaguered by aggressive investigators, incompetent leadership, betrayals, and generational changes that produced violent, unreliable leaders and recruits.

Publisher's Summary

In The Zero Marginal Cost Society,New York Times bestselling author Jeremy Rifkin argues that the capitalist era is passing—not quickly, but inevitably. The emerging Internet of Things is giving rise to a new economic system that will transform our way of life.

In this provocative new book, Rifkin argues that the coming together of the Communication Internet with the fledgling Energy Internet and Logistics Internet in a seamless twenty-first-century intelligent infrastructure—the Internet of Things—is boosting productivity to the point where the marginal cost of producing many goods and services is nearly zero, making them essentially free. The result is that corporate profits are beginning to dry up, property rights are weakening, and the conventional mind-set of scarcity is slowly giving way to the possibility of abundance. The zero marginal cost phenomenon is spawning a hybrid economy—part capitalist market and part “collaborative commons”—with far-reaching implications for society.

Rifkin describes how hundreds of millions of people are already transferring parts of their economic lives from capitalist markets to what he calls the global Collaborative Commons. “Prosumers” are making and sharing their own information, entertainment, green energy, and 3-D printed products at near zero marginal cost. They are also sharing cars, homes, clothes, and other items via social media sites, redistribution clubs, and cooperatives at low or near zero marginal cost. Students are even enrolling in free MOOCs, massive open online courses that operate at near zero marginal cost. And young social entrepreneurs are establishing ecologically sensitive businesses using crowd funding as well as creating alternative currencies in the new sharing economy. In this new world, social capital is as important as financial capital, access trumps ownership, cooperation supersedes competition, and “exchange value” in the capitalist marketplace is increasingly replaced by “sharable value” on the Collaborative Commons.

Rifkin concludes that while capitalism will be with us for the foreseeable future, albeit in an increasingly diminished role, it will not be the dominant economic paradigm by the second half of the twenty-first century. We are, Rifkin says, entering a world beyond markets, where we are learning how to live together in an increasingly interdependent global Collaborative Commons.

I was a bit skeptical about this book based on some of the criticisms about the authors political leanings. I was pleased to find that these were exaggerated. On the contrary, what I heard was the author putting forth a prediction about where our economy is headed, and backing it up with plenty of examples from daily life.

Regardless of whether you agree with him or not, there are many indisputably valid points. This book is well worth the read.

This is the most important book I’ve read predicting the future of our economy, new tech and energy businesses, and social enterprises that will drive the 3rd economic revolution. Sure there are holes as some readers mentioned – you can’t cover every eventuality in a single book – but at it’s core this is the future. One reviewer called it sci-fi, but we see it happening everywhere we look and are already participating ourselves in many of these new sharing economy technologies and approaches to recycle, reuse, and share.

In the US our capitalist way of life is very ingrained, but in other parts of the world, the zero marginal cost economy, technologies, and ways of living may very well leapfrog many of the economic standards we take for granted today. I saw this happen with technology leapfrogging in China. I lived there during college when relatively few people were connected even by phones. Because of the timing of new technology and China’s ability and willingness to embrace it, much of the country went straight to wireless and as an added benefit China isn’t crisscrossed by thousands of miles of eyesore above ground phone lines. Countries that need to take advantage of the sharing economy Rifkin describes will very likely do so a lot faster than those of us who cling to our ingrained capitalist methods and they will benefit greatly from doing so. In time, we too will follow.

TIR (third industrial revolution) is how Rifkin refers to the emerging collaborative economy. In this economy, thanks to 3D printing, solar and wind power, and the internet , he anticipates and unbundling of capitalist structures towards more collaborative regimes .

I enjoyed listening to this book. Rifkin lays out a key trend that is evolving. He does however, push this "zero marginal" cost a little too much. By this I mean he infrequently reminds the reader of the high fixed costs required to operate at close to zero marginal cost.

Would you try another book from Jeremy Rifkin and/or David Cochran Heath?

Probably not.

I was expecting an analysis of the impact that lower, close to zero marginal costs would have on businesses since the subtitle of the book included 'the eclipse of capitalism', but what I got was stories about how certain segments were seeing a rise of the collaborative commons. I don't disagree that these changes are occurring, but if anyone has paid attention to technology in society than they would already be aware of most of these stories.

What was lacking was a substantive analysis of how these changes would proceed. Instead there were general statements that the collaborative commons would push capitalism aside into a minor role in society. Mr. Rikfin never explains why that will happen. He doesn't provide any evidence that people will move from a profit seeking system to a 'good for all' system other than stories where this has happened in limited spaces.

There was also one major flaw in his economics and it was made right at the beginning and is key to his argument that capitalism is doomed. He states that price should equal marginal cost and thus as marginal cost gets close to zero then price will also get close to free. However economic theory states that marginal revenue equals marginal cost. As the president of a high-tech company I can state that this is also the principal that drives ours and our competitors' practices. This means that price will probably NOT go to zero even when marginal costs do. One just has to look at ebooks to find a mature industry that is already at near zero costs and prices are not zero (excluding promotions). If zero prices and the end of capitalism hasn't occurred in this industry why will it happen elsewhere.

Mr. Rifkin never tries to make a convincing case that it will. Instead he makes comments on why capitalism is bad, even though he grudgingly (it seems to me) admits that it has done more good than any other economic system. He seems to have a blind faith that the collaborative commons is a better system because it puts people and sharing first.

I'd be willing to place a bet that capitalism will be around longer than Mr. Rifkin believes, even if it is in a modified form. After all many of the positive stories that Mr. Rifkin talks about were initiated by capitalist companies, such as ride-sharing.

What do you think the narrator could have done better?

I had to play the book at 1.5 speed to maintain my interest. Part of this was the lack for substantive content, some was the narration.

Any additional comments?

In the end this was a very disappointing book especially written by someone who is supposed to be an adviser to government leaders. It was a struggle to listen to the entire book, but I did hoping there would be more 'meat' at the end. Unfortunately there wasn't so this will be the first Audible book I return for a refund.